Page:The Church of England, its catholicity and continuity.djvu/180

 meetings for their own edification, and this led to their preaching in the fields or anywhere. This movement roused up the spiritual life of the Church. It was Wesley's movement which gave birth to the Evangelical party in the Church of England. One wishes one had time to go into this part of our history with greater detail.

But I must now come to the chief point of this Lecture: which is to show how the Church received a new impetus to put forth the life which it has to-day. This impetus was given by the Oxford, or Tractarian Movement, as it has been called, and it began in the year 1833.

About that time the Evangelical movement which had sprung up in the Church had lost much of its force, and alongside of this there had sprung up a liberal movement for disposing of Creeds and Confessions of Faith. The Broad Church party at this date were about the only men who took a practical interest in religious questions. Mr. Gladstone gives a graphic description of affairs of this time. "It must be admitted," he says, "that the state of things &hellip; was dishonouring to Christianity, disgraceful to the nation; disgraceful most of all to that much-vaunted religious sentiment of the English public, which in impenetrable somnolence endured it, and resented all interference with it &hellip; The actual state of things as to worship was bad beyond all parallel known to me in experience or reading &hellip; Our services were probably without a parallel in the world for their debasement. As they would have shocked a Brahmin or a Buddhist, so they could hardly have been